Submitted Abstract

We applied RESCOM funding to the research seminar series of the Luxembourg School of Finance. The generous financial support of FNR helped us push the envelope further than ever before.Our seminar series featured numerous well-recognized academics as well as many promising young scholars (already with a proven track record) from institutions located all over the world presenting their new research results; a detailed list is included in other sections of this report. The line-up maintains a healthy balance in terms of subfields, geography, age and most importantly, gender (as much as it is possible in the profession).This series enabled the Luxembourg finance research community to interact with leading scholars for inspiration and knowledge exchange. Finance is one of the focus areas of the University of Luxembourg and therefore having an excellent seminar series fits well into the strategy of the University of Luxembourg.Our seminar series attracted attendees from many institutions such as numerous banks and other financial companies, the European Investment Bank, the Central Bank of Luxembourg, other research institutes, as well as other departments of the University of Luxembourg. The realized number of registered participants was approximately 30 attendees per seminar (adding up to the 905 reported).The standard seminar season schedules a seminar once a week from September to late June.As usual in active research departments, we filled speakers’ seminar days with individual one-on-one slots with faculty members, Ph.D. students, and other interested researchers, all this in addition to the lively interaction and discussion during the seminar.A significant innovation for this series was the reimagined invitation-RSVP-reminder cycle, with the weekly emails reaching 1.100-1.300 inboxes with approximately 270-350 opened (our ~25% open rates is above the world-wide industry average of 15.5%), with only 50% opened in Luxembourg.